31 · Agent Failure Modes

Great agents don't just work — they fail safely and recover smartly. This lists common agent failure modes and how to fix them, because in production, failures are inevitable.

How it works

1. 1Common failure modes: hallucination, wrong tool use, infinite loops, context overflow, bad retrieval, permission/auth errors, timeouts, race conditions.
2. 2Detect early with observability, metrics, evaluations and anomaly detection.
3. 3Recover automatically with retries, fallbacks and workflow resumption.
4. 4Use built-in patterns: retry with backoff, fallback models, human-in-the-loop escalation, checkpoints.

Key points

• Fix hallucinations with RAG, citations and guardrails; fix loops with max iterations and step budgets.
• Idempotency is your best friend for safe retries.
• Design for resilience: small focused tools, clear descriptions, bounded loops, structured output.
• A reliable agent isn't one that never fails — it's one that detects, recovers and learns faster.

Why it matters

Production agents will hit failures. Designing for detection and automatic recovery is what makes them trustworthy and safe rather than brittle.

Frequently asked questions

What are the most common failure modes?

Hallucination, wrong tool use, infinite loops, context overflow, bad retrieval, auth errors and timeouts.

How do I make retries safe?

Design tools to be idempotent, so re-running them doesn't cause duplicate or harmful effects.